I guess I will bite the bullet and join the modern era. I do slide shows for sportsman's clubs and I do classes that use overhead projections for visual aids. I want to go to Power Point. Can any of you answer these:

What do I need in terms of equipment and software?

Any advise on what equipment to buy?

How tricky is it to do a power point slide show or a projection of now on my hard drive?

Thanks for you help!

You will want/need:

A portable projector that has a high lumen rating and fits within your budget and is comfortable to travel with.

A portable computer that has enough video capabilities to properly project what it is that you are projecting. Embedded moves within PowerPoint require additional video "ooomph".

It's not tricky at all Dave. You just need to sit down and start working with PowerPoint. Next think you know, you'll be an expert.

Parker's Tip of the Day: ALWAYS RESIZE YOUR DIGITAL IMAGES FIRST!

Be AWARE of image sizes and that if you drag a LARGE image file to a PowerPoint slide, it will quickly make the PowerPoint presentation SO LARGE that your poor little computer will choke and die while trying to ope and run the presenation.

ALWAYS RESIZE YOUR DIGITAL IMAGES FIRST!

Then, once you've resized them to the proper size and resolution (proper size and resolution depends on what you projecting on too, how far away is your projector, and how good your projector is) bring them in to your slides.

You should stop by the UW for a lunch meeting, Dave. I'd happily give you some purchasing advice.

I'd be willing to bet that it would be worth your time and $$$ to do so.

Having been a PowerPoint veteran, Parker is spot on with his advice.

I would be happy to buy you lunch. The sooner the better, as I need to be up to speed on this soon. Whne and where.

p.S. i have a nasty cold right now. let's thing of next week?

For my first ever try at this I will be renting a projector. The first time I will want to project a bunch of Word pages. I have a manual with excercises and solutions. I used to show the solutions as overhead projections, now i want to use PP. The pages to be projected are part of a very large Word manual.

Hey old guy did you put together some pics from Mexico that I missed?

You just plug the projector into the monitor port of your laptop and it becomes your external monitor.

If you are going to be investing a lot of your time into learning it, take a class. Power Point 1-day Class Your time is your largest asset, you should invest 1 day to learn it inside and out and on a more personal level. You can master it by fighting through it by yourself, or jump the learning curve a bit. It looks like there is one in Seattle and Everett in March.

I just sent a couple of my staff to an Excel one, and they came back very confident in it. The class really helped to speed up the time from information stage, to complete output.